Francesco Lazzarotto

Francesco Lazzarotto, Marco Feroci, Maria Teresa Pazienza

Data on transient events, like GRBs, are often contained in large databases of unstructured data from space experiments, merged with potentially large amount of background or simply undesired information. We present a computational formal model to apply techniques of modern computer science -such as Data Mining (DM) and Knowledge Discovering in Databases (KDD)- to a generic, large database derived from a high energy astrophysics experiment. This method is aimed to search, identify and extract expected information, and maybe to discover unexpected information .

Francesco Lazzarotto, Ettore Del Monte

SuperAGILE (SA) is a detection system on board of the AGILE satellite (Astro-rivelatore Gamma a Immagini LEggero), a Gamma-ray astronomy mission approved by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) as first project for the Program for Small Scientific Missions, with launch planned in the second part of 2005. The developing and testing of the instrument took a big effort in software building and applications, we realized an integrated system to handle and to analyse measurement data since prototype tests until flight observations. The software system was created with an Object Oriented software design approach, and this permits to employ suitable libraries developed by other research teams and the integration of applications developed during our past work. This method allowed us to apply our schemas and written code on several prototypes, to share the work among different developers with the help of standard modeling instruments such as UML schemas. We also used SQL-based database techniques to access large amounts of data stored in the archives, this will improve the scientific return from space observations. All this has allowed our team to minimize the cost of developing in terms of man-power and resources, to dispone of a flexible system to face future needs of the mission and to invest it on other experiments.

Francesco Lazzarotto, Gabriele Cremonese, Alice Lucchetti et al.

Planetary science space missions need high quality software ed efficient algorithms in order to extract innovative scientific results from flight data. Reliable and efficient software technologies are increasingly vital to improve and prolong the exploiting of the results of a mission, to allow the application of established algorithms and technologies also to future space missions and for the scientific analysis of archived data. Here after will be given an in-depth analysis study accompanied by implementation examples on ESA and ASI missions and some remarkable results fruit of decades of important experience reached by space agencies and research institutes in the field. Space applications software quality analysis is not different from other application contexts, among the hi-tech and hi-reliability fields. We describe here a Software Quality study in general, then we will focus on the quality of space mission software (s/w) with details on some notable cases.